This invention relates to chub packaging machinery, utilized to produce chub products by stuffing of casing with comminuted material, and more particularly, to a stuffing horn telescoping and pivoting mechanism.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,945 and allowed application Ser. No. 07/285,325 filed Dec. 13, 1988 are incorporated by reference. In apparatus as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,945, chub products are rapidly formed of casing, comminuted material and metal clips. The comminuted material often constitutes sausage meats, and the casing constitutes sausage casing. Metal clips sold by Tipper Tie, Inc. are the standard of the industry. Comminuted material is placed in a hopper of a pumping apparatus, and pumped. The material is pumped through a horn among the several hours of a horn turret assembly. The horn extends to a casing brake, and the horn has a casing segment shirred on its exterior. Tension of the casing is adjusted at the casing horn to provide proper advancement of both the comminuted material and casing. Stuffed casing is intermittently voided and clipped to provide ends of resulting chub products.
Casing as used in the apparatus of U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,945 must be used in segments. Loading of such segments presents a major hurdle in increasing speed of chub forming machines. As the horn turret assembly is shown in FIGS. 1 and 2 of U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,945, which are FIGS. 1 and 2 of this specification, multiple horns are provided on a turret such that while one horn is in operative position, another horn is in service position for placement of casing thereon. Depletion of casing on the horn in operative position results in interruption of the chub forming, retraction of the horn, and pivoting of the turret to bring the serviced horn into operative position. While the stuffing horn mechanism of U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,945 and allowed application Ser. No. 07/285,325 is highly desirable for a variety of reasons, research and development has continued toward a simpler, equally rapidly acting stuffing horn mechanism.